Saturday, March 8, 2014

I will begin this post with
apologies to my regular readers for taking a mid-winter writing hiatus this
year. The truth is, in early January, my wife and youngest daughter and I moved
out of the city and back to rural Colorado where we are home. After ten years
of urban homesteading—creating a half-acre farm on an unused church lot, putting
chickens, bunnies, bees and goats in our backyard (in violation of local
ordinances but not against the wishes of the neighbors), community-building
wherever possible, and, most important of all, raising teenagers who
participated in all of the above—we pulled up stakes and returned to our small-town
roots in the mountains.

Here we have a ready-made
community of old friends and ample opportunity to make new ones. I’ve gone back
to writing for the local newspaper about issues that really matter to the
locals, but rarely make it onto anyone’s radar farther than a day’s walk from
here. Above all, since my return, the living landscape of snowy mountain trails
and sleepy, icebound rivers has sent me hourly invitations to walk and get reacquainted.
I’ve spent a lot of time catching up on the news from the year-round neighbors:
fox, rabbit, mouse, muskrat, magpie, bald eagle, coyote, red-tailed hawk,
willow, wild rose, cottonwood, deer, elk, raccoon—just to name a few.

The net result has been an onset
of severe attention deficit anytime I picture sitting in front of the computer
for longer than absolutely necessary. The creek nearby is never the same at
sunset as it was in the morning, a fact I feel compelled to personally verify.
Many of the itinerant citizens are beginning to return or awaken—robin, geese, skunk,
beaver, red-winged blackbirds—and I hate to miss the opportunity to be the
first to greet them. The Milky Way is vivid in the sky most nights, and the
moon is a lazy and companionable town crier marking the time of the month.

In this setting, a brisk walk feels
too fast, and in any case is only possible on manmade roads. Trails are made
for stopping and looking—one continuous scenic turnout. Straight lines are an
abstraction. If it weren’t for power poles and the angular walls and roof of my
house I might stop believing in them altogether. Even the bare willow branches
reach sideways in arching yoga poses that seem to deny the very existence of
rectitude. It is a meandering, curvaceous, flibbertigibbet world—a state that
is highly contagious to wanderers. Old stories tell of travelers who stumble
into enchanted groves and fall out of time, forgetting who they are (or at least
who they are expected to be by others). Storytellers lay the blame on
mischievous fairy folk, but I begin to believe in a less exotic explanation. Up
and down, east and west, in summer and winter, the whole world is timeless
already and quite content to simply be. This gives off a thoroughly
intoxicating fragrance.

But please don’t think I am only
talking about this particular style of living in this particular place. I know
that most people have no choice but to live in the city. And let’s be honest, most
of those would stay where they are in any case. Many of my urban friends think
I’m bonkers for preferring starlight to the late-night neon excitement of
metropolitan life.

I’m talking about what happens to anyone,
anywhere on the planet when you become available and open to having a relationship with the world and with the
ground-level facts of your life. Pigeons and potted plants are just as rooted
in the timeless now as pine trees and beaver ponds. A tomato vine on an
apartment patio can connect you with the living community that provides your
food. Running barefoot through soccer field grass will heighten your sense of
belonging on the earth and remind you that putting one foot in front of the
other—literally—is something you have in common with every other person who has
ever lived. I’m talking about a universal way to experience time, people,
nature, walking and breathing that is more in synch with true human nature than
living at a machine’s pace.

It is also in synch with the
future. The fact is, most of the complex systems which isolate us from the
earth and alienate us from each other in today’s frantic world are already in
steep decline (even if your iPhone still functions for a while). It isn’t hard
to justify that claim. We need only consider the fact that the era of cheap oil
over for good, clearly evident in the present, prolonged economic crisis and
associated geopolitical seizures. Add in the combined stresses of a number of
social and environmental emergencies and it becomes implausible—if not
impossible—to believe in a future where prosperity continues to be defined as
endless economic growth and financial profit. That model is mortally wounded.

If human history is a novel, then
we’ve reached the climax, the final turning point in which the protagonists
(us) either change or die. We now must grow or suffer unspeakable consequences.
This is the moment when we find out if the burning question raised in act one
can be resolved in act three: “Will we cease our juvenile infatuation with
ourselves and visions of our own splendor and return to balanced relationship
with the rest of creation in time to avoid a really unhappy ending?”

This morning, as I walked along a
snow-free ridgeline formed by south facing outcroppings of schist and gneiss
more than 2 billion years old, I thought, “Of course we can. We possess
everything we need to succeed.”

Then I remembered the question
wasn’t can we evolve our way into a
better future; it was will we. That’s
up to each of us right where we are. I recommend you begin by slowing down and
paying attention to things that have always been.